


Settling In

by Mireille



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: maleslashminis, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-02
Updated: 2006-10-02
Packaged: 2019-03-13 16:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Buffy and Willow are settling in at college. Xander and Giles are settling into something quite different.





	Settling In

The girls, they told one another, were settling in. 

When Giles' books remained unopened because there wasn't anything to research, they didn't worry. Buffy was settling in at college, they said, and things would be back to normal soon. Then they went back to rearranging books; Xander was starting to think the volumes were multiplying as soon as they turned their backs. 

And Xander wasn't bothered that Willow didn't call him--and they'd _never_ gone this long without seeing each other, unless one or the other of them wasn’t actually in town, not since kindergarten--because Willow was at college, and they had to give her space to settle in. 

So he and Giles were giving them time, and he was fine with that. They were unpacking books and cataloguing... stuff Xander couldn't even identify, but he could hand it to Giles and then pack it back in its box when Giles had finished making notes about it. Sometimes, when they got sick of that, they'd just sit on Giles' couch and talk about... nothing, really. 

He didn't remember ever just _talking_ to Giles--not for very long, anyway, not without something specific to talk about. It was kind of--well, yeah, "weird" was the first word that came to mind, but "good" was right after it. 

It had been a while since he'd had a guy to talk to. Oz didn't count. He was Willow's boyfriend, and boyfriend-of-best-friend wasn't quite the same as guy-friend. And boyfriend-of-girl-you-cheated-on-your-girlfriend-with was _way_ far from guy-friend, even if they were cool now, so, no, Oz didn't count. 

Giles counted. It was different, talking to Giles now; it wasn't Buffy's Watcher talking to Buffy's friend, or the school librarian talking to someone who still hadn't returned that book with the really good illustrations of "skyclade Witches and theyre unspeakable Rites," which in Xander's brain (and apparently the artist's) looked a lot like what you got in the better class of reform-school-girl porn. Maybe, he thought, it was good that he hadn't returned that book. It'd be a shame if it had gotten blown up. 

Not that Giles had mentioned that book, which was kind of Xander's point. It had just been two guys, sitting on the couch talking. And even though they mostly talked about nothing, or at least nothing important, an awful lot of _something_ slipped through the spaces of the conversation, somehow. Xander realized that he'd learned a lot more about Giles in the past several days than he had in the past three years. 

Like that when he inflicted his music on Xander (Xander mostly complained because he figured Giles expected it; it wasn’t _that_ bad), Giles would not, _not_ , let you talk during the guitar solos. Ever. And if you looked the other way for a while and then looked back really quickly, there was--not air guitar like when Xander and Jesse were fourteen and were being dorks, but just Giles' fingers moving the way Oz's did sometimes as he listened to music, sliding across imaginary strings and frets. 

Like that there was such a thing as British junk food--who knew?--and Giles got it from some store in Los Angeles. And then laughed when Xander bit into what looked like a perfectly innocent cookie and there was weird orange jelly stuff hidden under the chocolate. And _then_ hid the box overnight when Xander got over the "what the hell?" reaction and decided that they were pretty good, after all.

Like that Giles had a family--okay, so it's not like Xander thought he'd hatched from an egg or anything, he knew the guy had to have had parents, but he had, like, an _actual family_. With aunts and uncles and cousins, including one who called him on the phone while Xander was there, which was how the subject came up in the first place. Xander wasn't a hundred percent sure how he felt about that one. Not that he wanted Giles to be alone in the world or anything, but he'd gotten used to thinking of Giles as just theirs, and he didn’t completely like being reminded that Giles had this whole other life that none of them had anything to do with. 

But mostly, he learned that Giles had more books than any human being should ever own. 

By the evening of the third day he'd been there, they _still_ weren't finished. Xander had been about to call it a night and ask Giles what time he should come back in the morning when Giles suggested they go and get Chinese food. He'd taken longer to suggest it than most people would take to _eat_ it, so Xander had finally interrupted him and suggested that they get going. 

Giles had seemed kind of... surprised, maybe, which he shouldn’t have been. Of course Xander had said yes, because Giles was buying, and after he'd paid his mom the rent yesterday he had exactly eleven dollars and nine cents to his name--no, eight, he'd dropped a penny and it had rolled under the dryer. Besides, he was liking hanging out with Giles, and the girls were settling in at college, so why would he want to go home?

The Shanghai Moon had been the Peking Garden before Xander had left on his road trip, the Panda Express Chinese before that, and at least eight other names that Xander could remember. The junk drawer in his parents' kitchen was full of their delivery menus, the old ones getting buried under the new like some kind of takeout-food fossil layer. The new owners hadn't changed much: the napkins were gold and the tablecloths red, instead of the other way around, but besides that, it was still the same basic Chinese-place-that-used-to-be-a-Pizza-Hut that he remembered. 

Giles was quiet while they looked at the menu, and Xander found himself talking almost non-stop to fill the silence, unwrapping his silverware and fidgeting with his spoon as he went on and on about... God, he really had no idea what he was talking about. The restaurant, but there was no way he could have talked that long about the restaurant, could he? 

Oh, God, he was an idiot. And what was he babbling for, anyway? It wasn't like he'd never had a normal conversation with Giles. He'd had one _that afternoon_ , even. But he was talking too much and fidgeting and restless. He couldn't even blame it on being hungry, because right now he was too jumpy to want to eat. 

Which was bizarre, because it felt like he was nervous, and being nervous around Giles, at this point, was like being nervous around Willow and Buffy. Maybe he _was_ just hungry. Low blood sugar could make you feel weird, right? 

Once they'd ordered, Xander felt a little calmer, and when the waiter had brought their drinks, he sipped his Coke and managed to go several minutes without saying anything stupid. He looked around, trying to see if they still had the ancient Ms. Pac-Man game in the corner. Maybe his and Jesse's initials were still on the high scores list--they had been the last time he was in here, since the game was mostly played by bored six-year-olds--and that was when he noticed that the women at the next table over were looking at them. 

Well, no. Not at _them_ , and he was not entirely unhappy about them not looking at _him_ , because he was pretty sure one of them worked with his mom. Besides, they were all about his mom's age, which made it not all that surprising that the looking was definitely at Giles. So was the smiling. And, Xander would bet his last eleven dollars and eight cents, the exchanging of phone numbers, given half a chance. 

"That woman over there is trying to flirt with you," he said to Giles, grinning, because he'd seen Giles when someone was hitting on him, and honestly? It was pretty funny. A little irritating this time, though. Couldn't the women of Sunnydale have picked some time when Giles wasn't hanging around with him to start flirting?

It suddenly occurred to him that maybe they did. He had no idea what happened when Giles went places by himself. And he wasn't going to think about it, either, because it was none of his business. Also, he didn't care what happened when he wasn't around to tease Giles about it. 

"I know," Giles said, not looking. He drank his tea, refilling the cup from the pot the waiter had brought, and made a few comments to Xander about things they'd talked about earlier that day. And still didn't look over at the table across the aisle, which was just... weird. 

There was no way, if the situation had been reversed and Giles had been telling him that there was a girl sitting at the next table trying to get his attention, he wouldn't have at least looked. "You know," Xander said finally, "if you _want_ to go over there and get her number--"

"No, Xander," Giles said quietly, "I can't think of a single reason I'd want to do that."

Giles was looking right at him when he said it, too, and whoa, there was the nervousness back again, bad enough that you'd think he was out on a first date or--

Something, his brain finished for him, although it had already moved onto another train of thought, one that went right along with the nervousness and the ignoring of available-and-reasonably-attractive women and the way Giles was just _looking_ at him, like he was waiting to see what happened when Xander figured it all out. 

Which was right about now, when everything sort of clicked together in his brain--better late than never, he figured, but definitely late. Yeah, maybe you'd think he was out on a first date or something, with a guy he'd been hanging out with and liked spending time with and kept watching out of the corner of his eye just to see the look he got on his face when the guitar solo in the song on the stereo got to the good part. 

You'd think. Unless, of course, you were an idiot, in which case you'd have taken until now to figure that out. 

"You mean," Xander said finally, "because this is a, um... okay, would it be completely out of line to call this a, a date?" And shouldn't he be freaking out at the thought, instead of sitting here trying not to grin in case Giles told him he was wrong? Yes. Yes, he definitely should. 

He just wasn't. And okay, he might have figured out this summer that the idea of dating a guy, in the generic sense, was something he was in favor of, but this wasn't just a guy, it was Giles, and it should have been at least a little bit freaky. 

And it kept not feeling the least bit freaky, so now the only thing he had to worry about was whether Giles thought he was insane for having jumped to that particular conclusion. 

But Giles just nodded slightly, and while he was smiling, Xander couldn't help but notice the way he hadn't been able to stop one eyebrow from quirking upward as if to ask if it had really taken him this long to figure out what was going on. 

Right. Now was the time to say something... cool and mature. Something to let Giles know that Xander was okay with that, was not wigging about it except for the part where he hadn't _noticed_. That he was, in fact, in favor of the date-ness of the rest of that evening. 

What he said was, "Oh." 

Then, just to make sure Giles realized that was a _good_ "Oh," he added, "Cool," grinning at Giles. 

He was grateful that their food arrived just then, because it meant he didn't have to think of what to say after that. 

Dinner was a lot more normal than Xander would have expected. They talked about stuff like whether the unidentifiable meat in the Chef Special Happy Family was pork or chicken (Xander redeemed himself, in his own eyes at least, by not suggesting it was anything gross), and where Xander was going to put in job applications next week, and things Giles had done over the summer. 

After a while, they talked, very vaguely, about what Xander had done over the summer; he supplied the car-breakdown and dish-washing parts of the summer and left out anything potentially humiliating. He hadn't wanted Giles to know about those parts of his summer yesterday, and now he was even more definite about that. 

It could almost have been a normal, non-date type of meal, except for the time when he and Giles both reached for the soy sauce at the same time, and instead of moving his hand away like he'd normally do, Xander let his fingers brush Giles' hand, thumb rubbing over the skin between Giles' thumb and forefinger. 

Giles looked up at him, smiling, and Xander grinned before going back to his dinner, the soy sauce completely forgotten. 

A few seconds later, it dawned on him that maybe being obviously on a date with a guy in front of a woman his mother worked with was not the brightest idea ever, and his grin faded. 

"Is something wrong?"

"No," Xander said quickly, because his family was something he figured he ought to get Giles used to slowly. Like, over a period of years. 

Then he took a deep breath, feeling a little calmer. It probably wasn't that bad. His mother would talk to him before she talked to his dad; she'd do just about anything before she talked to Dad. If he got her to look at it as a them-against-Dad deal, it'd all be fine. "No," he repeated, and this time he meant it. "I'm fine." 

And he was, even though when they left the restaurant and got back into Giles' car--which Xander supposed he couldn't say much about, since it at least showed no signs of falling apart around them--the nervous fidgeting was back. This time, at least, he knew what was causing it: the whole running monologue in his head where he tried to figure out exactly how dates of the non-high-school variety were supposed to go, once the "dinner" part was over. He didn't want to make an idiot of himself. 

Then he realized that this was _Giles_ , and if he was going to be turned off by Xander doing something dumb, they wouldn't have been here in the first place. He relaxed a little then, though he kept coming _this_ close to reaching over and touching Giles' arm, and then pulling his hand back, rubbing his palm over the knee of his jeans.

It was just so surreal. A couple of hours ago, he'd been helping Giles rearrange his bookshelves, and now-- 

And now they were parked outside Giles' apartment, and that surreal feeling still hadn't gone away. This wasn't happening. He was going to wake up in a second and find out he was late for school, or that he'd dozed off in the kitchen staff's break room back at the club, and his life was going to be back to its normal suckitude.

He really didn't want it to get back to normal. So when Giles turned off the engine, Xander finally made himself reach out, his hand resting on Giles' forearm. "Wait," he said. 

Giles looked over at him quizzically, and Xander just looked at him for a minute, taking in all the little details he realized he'd been paying attention to all along without understanding why: everything from the color of Giles' eyes to the tiny nick under his jaw where he'd cut himself shaving that morning. 

He took his hand away from Giles' arm, moving it up to touch Giles' face, feeling the prickle of razor-stubble under his fingers, the whisper of breath across his palm as Giles turned his head. "I just--I want--" He wanted to know this was real, he thought, but he didn't want to sound crazy. He was pretty sure it was real, after all, it was just that stuff like this didn't happen to him. He didn't just get handed something he'd just been starting to figure out he wanted. That was too much like good luck, so he had to be sure. 

He slid over then, pressing his lips to Giles' before he lost his nerve. 

Yeah, that was real; if he was dreaming this Giles wouldn't have looked so surprised, and--he realized a little late to do any good--he probably would have looked around to see if there was anyone outside before he did it, since it still hadn't gotten completely dark. 

Then Giles got over being surprised and kissed him back, and Xander couldn't have cared less if there was anyone outside. Giles' lips parted for his without hesitation, and Xander let himself be drawn deeper into the kiss. His hand slid around to cup the back of Giles' head, and he felt, rather than heard, Giles sigh softly. 

They pulled apart after a little while, and Xander was glad to see he wasn't the only one whose breath was coming a little rapidly now. He grinned at Giles. "We should probably, you know, go inside." 

"Yes," Giles agreed, and then neither of them said anything else until they were in the apartment and Giles had closed the door behind them. 

Xander was still grinning; he didn't know if he was going to stop any time soon, even if he did feel a little awkward standing just inside Giles' doorway wondering what happened next. 

It turned out that what happened next was that Giles turned a light on--just one, on the table next to the couch--and sat down, looking back at Xander. "Coming to join me?" he asked. 

Xander walked over to the couch, and when he got there, Giles took his hand, drawing Xander down to sit next to him. Giles' arm went around Xander's shoulder, which was a weird feeling; he was a lot more used to being the one doing that. It was the kind of weird he thought he could eventually get used to, though. 

Then Giles' mouth found his again, and that, Xander planned on getting used to right away: long, slow, messy kisses that had Xander sliding closer to Giles on the couch, Giles' tongue teasing him, coaxing sounds out of him that Xander didn't remember hearing himself make before. 

His hand started out resting on Giles' chest, but after a minute Xander realized he was twisting Giles' shirt in his fist, clutching at it, at Giles. He was at least half-hard already, his cock registering its approval of Giles' mouth on his and Giles' hand rubbing circles on his back and the quiet, needy sounds Giles was making. Xander found himself wondering if he was having the same effect on Giles. 

When they finally separated for a moment, both of them breathing hard and Giles, at least, looking a little flushed, Xander risked a glance downward to confirm that yeah, he had. He was afraid he might not have been able to keep from looking at least a little pleased about that. 

The smugness faded pretty quickly, though, when he realized he didn't have any idea what to do now. In general terms, yeah, but in terms of how to get from point A, making out on the couch, to point B, anything involving going upstairs to Giles' bedroom? Clueless. And in terms of--well, okay, sounding like a girl, he admitted, but in terms of suggesting that he might need a couple of hours to give his brain a chance to catch up to what was going on before they got near point B? Even more clueless. 

Then Giles' arm went around him again, pulling him closer, and Xander figured it would all work out. _This_ was easy. This was just like the rest of the evening had turned out to be: once he figured out what was going on, it was just fine. 

Xander leaned in to kiss Giles again, lightly this time, and then shifted on the couch so that he was sitting with his legs tucked underneath him. 

Yeah, this was going to be just fine, he thought, grinning up at Giles again. And as much as he missed the girls, he wouldn't mind giving them a few more days to get used to being in college. 

He had some settling in of his own to do.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
